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Over the more than 20 years that I've been covering printers, stretching back to before PC Magazine's first blockbuster printer issue in 1984, the field has changed a lot. Lasers and ink jets long ago replaced daisy wheels and dot matrix in the home and office; color printers, once rare, have all but taken over; photo printers have gone from being nonexistent to being on the verge of making commercial film printing obsolete; and speeds for desktop printers have grown by an order of magnitude and then some. But all of those changes are nothing compared with what may be about to happen.

As I'm writing this, the dust has yet to settle from the recent introduction of the Memjet printing technology at the 2007 Global Ink Jet Printing Conference. There's still skepticism surrounding Memjet from people who rightly believe that when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. But if Memjet really delivers what it promises, its impact on printing and on the printing industry will be huge.

The technology was developed over the course of ten-plus years by Silverbrook Research (www.silverbrookresearch.com), a little-noticed Australian company that reportedly didn't even have a Web site until it dropped its bombshell announcement in March.

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What Memjet does is hard to believe: It prints letter-size output at 60 ppmthat's one page per secondwith a 1,600- by 1,600-dot-per-inch (dpi) printer that Silverbrook says will be available in 2008 for maybe $200 to $300. Not only that, but the projected cost per page is less than 2 cents for a monochrome page and less than 6 cents for a color page.

There's more to the story, too. The letter-size version is only one of several basic configurations. A dedicated photo-printer version promises to print 4- by 6-inch photos at the more leisurely pace of one every 2 seconds (the fastest personal dedicated photo printer I've ever tested takes about 25 times as long) at a projected price of about $150 for the printer and just 10 to 20 cents per photo. And a wide-format version for graphic artists who need to print posters and the like will print at an unheard-of 6 to 12 inches per second, as will a label-printer versionsay, for printing coupons at a supermarket checkout.

The first time I read these numbers, I was suitably impressed, but numbers don't have the same impact as watching the printers in action. You can't find Memjet printers for sale anywhere so that you could look at them, but you can see video clips of reference prototypes for all of these configurations on the Silverbrook Research Web site, at www.memjet.com/media.aspx.  next: The Tech Behind the Ink

About the Author

M. David Stone is an award-winning freelance writer and computer industry consultant. Although a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a top company in the gaming industry. David is also an expert in imaging technologies (including printers, moni... See Full Bio

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